China to 'put a man on moon'
From: Reuters
From: correspondents in Beijing
June 19, 2006

CHINA has set 2024 for its first moonwalk, a Hong Kong newspaper reported today.

The mission would kick off in earnest next year, the Beijing-backed Wen Wei Po paper said, when China launched an unmanned lunar satellite in March or April to orbit and survey the lunar surface.
"China now basically possesses the technology, materials and the economic strength" to put a human on the moon, the paper quoted a Chinese space program official as saying.

China has come a long way since then paramount leader Mao Zedong lamented in 1957 – the year the Soviet Union put the first man-made object into orbit – that his country was incapable even of putting a potato into space.

In 2003, China became only the third country – after the US and Soviet Union – to launch a man into space aboard its own rocket.